Binance Will Support Bitcoin L2 Hardfork As Upgrade Countdown Begins

@Binance has confirmed it will support the upcoming @Stacks hardfork, set to activate in roughly 279 $BTC blocks. The announcement was made by Stacks founder @Muneeb, who posted the exchange's commitment as the countdown to the network upgrade tightens ahead of a Thursday activation.

What the PoX-5 Upgrade Changes

The hardfork, known as PoX-5, is scheduled for July 29 and follows a successful community vote with overwhelming support for SIP-044 and SIP-045. The upgrade brings trustless, self-custodial Bitcoin staking to the network. More broadly, the change represents a material architectural shift for the primary Bitcoin Layer-2, addressing two of the network's most significant limitations: transaction finality and programmable utility for $BTC.

The upgrade introduces Bitcoin Finality, which the Stacks Foundation says makes Stacks transactions as irreversible as those executed on the Bitcoin blockchain, meaning the network can no longer fork on its own. With this mechanism, transaction ordering and reversal on Stacks L2 are protected by all of Bitcoin's hash power, and fast blocks reduce settlement delay to a few seconds instead of Bitcoin's 10 to 40 minutes.

The Monitoring Tag and Market Concern

$STX dropped to a six-year low driven by market concerns over the token's monitoring tag on Binance. The Stacks team indicated the tag change on Binance was likely tied to the upcoming PoX-5 hardfork, and that other major centralized exchange partners had already been notified and moved forward in support. According to the team, the tag will be removed once consensus-level changes on Binance are completed.

@Muneeb's comments suggest the broader market has yet to fully price in the significance of the architectural shift. Binance's formal commitment to supporting the hardfork mirrors the exchange's established pattern with Stacks upgrades, where trading of STX is not impacted during the network upgrade and Binance handles all technical requirements for users holding STX in their accounts.

With the activation window now measured in hours rather than days, attention turns to whether Binance's endorsement and the removal of the monitoring tag will stabilize sentiment around $STX heading into the upgrade.

Sources
AMBCrypto: Stacks STX crashes as PoX-5 testnet goes live
Binance: Support for Stacks STX Network Upgrade and Hard Fork
The Defiant: Stacks Unlocks Fast Blocks and Bitcoin Finality